On the Viewless Wings of Poesy - Wilfried Dickhoff

Wilfried Dickhoff
On the Viewless Wings of Poesy
Christopher Le Brun's new watercolours are a beautiful surprise. Simple,
complicated landscapes with unfashionable painterly quality. Far removed from
spontaneity tinged with expression and post-conceptual self-censorship, they
give to sight a logic of sensation drawing the gaze into a poetic space.
Le Brun's interest is in the accumulation of ideas in watercolour painting,
compositions of perception and sensation which stand for themselves. Not for
him, those clichés of simplicity, fragmentation and collages. Instead, he strives
to create an image differentiated in itself, not illustrating an idea but offering a
"radiant node or cluster“ (Ezra Pound) evoking associations, memories,
narratives and possible meanings. Here, the beholder is neither confronted with
stereotypes of disillusionment, nor with conventions of destruction. Rather than
disappointing expectations, these watercolours invite the viewer to take a
journey of sensation. Everything is open and welcoming, everything encourages
the beholder to approach. Every nuance harbours references and allusions to
tales and emotions, partially familiar, partly unfamiliar. Le Brun is interested in
representation in the specific sense he terms "the associative re-presentation of
“reality”“ (CLB). But the evocative texture of this re-presentation, both materially
and iconographically multi-layered, is founded in Le Brun's painterly model – the
constellation of drawing (will) and colour (magic), the ensemble of lines and
zones, the image's a-significant and non-representative outlines and surfaces,
which Gilles Deleuze calls diagram. The diagram is the constitutive break with
every kind of figuration, and a catastrophe for every representation. However, it
can self-generate figures and figuration that realizes re-presentation. It can also
refrain from doing so, remaining self-referential. It may also reveal innumerable
other vectors capable of indicating an endowment of meaning (Sinn) even in the
meaningless. But nothing works in painting without a self-willed syntax, the
image's a-significant body. In his watercolours, Le Brun's distinct syntax
encompasses contradictory forms. He varies figuration and non-figuration, from
the non-representational object to a figure just visible in the diagram as such to

an illustrative figuration, and he does this both in harsh contrasts and subtle
nuances. In this way, abstract barricades obscure an illusion of nature or
abstract towers plead for an art insisting on autonomy, or impossible
architectures appear interwoven with illusions of trees. In these virtuoso
formations, the diagram shines so brilliantly in the depiction that it appears to
reflect itself. Here, there are traits of a meta-representation that, as in Poussin,
presents itself. Le Brun is interested in symbols and, for this reason, he re-reads
the traditions of Poussin, Lorrain, Böcklin, Von Marees, Watts, Turner, Guston or
De Chirico. But he is not concerned with restoring illustrative inscriptions of
meaning and substantively ordering pictorial space, but with the paradoxical
presumption of the "potential innocence of complicated layered composition“
(CLB) – in the full awareness of deconstruction's achievement. Le Brun's
watercolours are abstract re-presentations whose virtuoso nuanced form sounds
correspondences of a muta poesis, a mute poesy: "Who heareth, seeth not form,
but is led by its emanation“ (Ezra Pound).
Le Brun's watercolours are figurative formulations of an affective intellectual
landscape, lyrical images of an impossible vista whose possibilities he heard in
Claude Debussy's "Pelleas and Melisande“ and Arnold Schönberg's "Gurre-
Lieder“. It is home to a palace of art, described by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his
eponymous poem as the architecture of a self-equilibrium precariously misplaced
between art and society. And this is itself not dissimilar to the enchanted castle
where Cupid's love drives him to hold prisoner the unbearably beautiful Psyche.
Claude Lorrain's "Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid (The
Enchanted Castle)“ is a work recounting the tragedy of every encounter between
love and beauty. Here, the heart of the poetic reference may echo most
profoundly in John Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale“ (1819), an evocation of the
paradoxical nature of all emotions – "on the viewless wings of poesy“ (JK); this
phrase, in turn, is probably drawn from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1818 lecture
"On Poesy or Art“ where he argues for the freedom of art in repressive times.
All of that is involved here and much more besides. In the masterly
watercoloured guise of abstract symbolism, Le Brun's watercolours evoke
thoughts and feelings that somehow affect all of us at some time. Le Brun
pursues a dangerous thinking in sensations, following a course where false
feelings, kitsch and sentimentality also beckon. He accepts that challenge, takes

it on and parries it by giving to sight, in lived experience and with its
ambivalence critically dissected, the inexplicable art of (ir-)real presences. These
works reveal something still unredeemed, a primeval longing, "something that
shines in everyone's childhood but a place no one has yet been: Heimat“ (Ernst
Bloch).
"The purpose of art is undefined“, Paul Valéry said. If it were defined, there
would certainly be many beautiful works of art in the world fulfilling that
purpose, "… but none that were inexplicably beautiful, and there would be none
of those images one can never explain." But they are precisely the interesting
ones. And isn't this quality of non-identity essentially the interesting aspect of
art? Interesting art is an immanent difference whose flesh is its spirit. Rather
than expressing a certain something, it is the pressure of thought itself, physical
movement of the body as conceptual sensation. It is an “intimate impression”
(Jean-Luc Nancy), an animated embossing of a surface that ends with an image
as fascination. But, as Maurice Blanchot says, isn't fascination, the attraction of
the image as passion and suffering, this moment in which what one sees seizes
the gaze and the gaze becomes light, the gaze of solitude? Fascination as the
gaze of solitude is the interesting core looking out at us from Christopher Le
Brun's watercolours.